The stated aim of The CIA Doctors by Colin Ross, M.D. is an excellent and much-needed one: "to prove that the Manchurian Candidate is fact, not fiction, ...and that "the creation of controlled disassociation was a major goal of mind control research." (p. 10) As he says, he is not a conspiracy theorist and has no axe to grind against the CIA: his concern is that his fellow psychiatrists, including some of the most prestigious individuals and medical schools in the country, have violated and are violating their Hippcratic Oath by their participation in the unethical programs of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. A case in point is the eminent psychiatrist G.H. Estabrooks, the only participant who actually admitted-- indeed boasted-- that he was able to create totally new and programmed personalities: as he said, "The key to creating an effective spy or assassin rests in splitting a man's personality, or creating multipersonality, with the aid of hypnotism... This is not science fiction. This has and is being done. I have done it." (p. 151). There is however one major problem with this book. It was orginally written in 2000, and when Dr. Ross revised it in 2006, he did not add any new material to speak of. Thus the connection between the experiments carried out by the CIA during the Cold War and the treatment of detainees in the so-called "War on Terror" is not made explicit, as it is in Alfred McCoy's A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Yet the similarity between the way that "Manchurian candidates" were created during the Cold War and terrorist suspects are being treated today is striking.
Take for example, Mohammed Al Qahtani, one of the "Guantánamo Six" on trial for his life under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Mr. Al Qahtani is one of the few terrorist suspects who have been permitted to have civilian lawyers, in his case from the progressive Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). A CCR information paper on Al Qahtani lists the abuses to which he has been subjected, in a manner which is at times a bit confusing. For instance, he is described as having been subjected to "forced administration of numerous IVs during interrogation." Is it really possible that his captors thought that Al Qahtani would be severely affected by merely being poked repeatedly with hypodermic needles? Having myself been a victim of forced drugging and drug-induced torture, I could not help but wonder when I read this, "What was in those hypodermic needles?" One passage in The CIA Doctors was invaluable in answering that question. It concerns "interrogations" (I shall put this word in quotes whenever the aim does not appear to be the acquisition of intelligence) of various individuals, under the CIA program ARTICHOKE. During these so-called "interrogations", subjects were given unspecified chemicals intravenously. Then, to quote a CIA document, "1. A false memory was introduced into the subject's mind without his conscious control of the process, which took 15 to 20 minutes. 2. The procedure was repeated, this time taking 40 to 45 minutes. 3. The procedure was repeated again with interrogation added." (p. 39)
The possibility that Al Qahtani may have been subjected to the same regime is reinforced by the fact that both the ARTICHOKE victims and Al Qahtani were subjected to repeated strip searches, extreme solitary confinement, sleep and food deprivation, and exposure to severe cold. Abuses up to and including torture have a definite role to play in the creation of a new identity, whether that of a "Manchurian Candidate" or terrorist. That is to say, they are part of the process of depatterning. As Ross says, in the first phase of the creation of a new personality, the subject is depatterned, which means they are reduced to a vegetable state through a combination of massive amounts of electroconvulsive shocks, drug-induced sleep and sensory isolation and deprivation. When fully depatterned, patients are incontinent of urine and feces, unable to feed themselves, and unable to state their name, age, location, or the current date (p. 124) As O'Brien says to Winston in 1984, "We will empty you and fill you with ourselves." It is after this depatterning that the narco-hypnotic process begins, and the subject acquires a new identity and memory. The new identity could make subjects commit violent crimes which they had no natural inclination for, as well as confessing to ones they did not commit. For instance, one woman subject of CIA experimentation who was afraid of firearms was induced to shoot another subject with a gun she believed was loaded. Others were able to set off time-bombs at the mere mention of a particular code-word. (pp. 46-47)
Of course, the fact that the subject has acquired a new identity has to be hidden from the subject himself or herself. One of the most puzzling things to anyone who has done research on CIA abuses is why an agency charged with the acquisition of intelligence would take an interest in procedures, such as electroconvulsive treatment (ECT), which are notorious for producing amnesia. The explanation is to be found in the following CIA document, quoted by Ross: "Quite often amnesia occurs for events just prior to the convulsion, during the convulsion and during the post-seizure period. It is possible that hypnosis or hypnotic activity induced during the post-seizure state might be lost in amnesia. This would be very valuable." Interrogation, including torture, was often conducted after the experiments, simply to determine if the amnesia surrounding the implanted memory could be breached. (p. 49) In other words, our government might be taking completely innocent individuals, reducing them to a vegetable state through torture, giving them a new identity as a terrorist by means of narco-hypnosis, and then torturing them again in order to see if they believe in this new identity enough to confess, not just to their torturers, but when they are trotted out before the public. Someone like Al Qahtani would have no recollection of the introduction of a false memory through chemicals and hypnosis any more than the subjects of ARTICHOKE did. Victims of ARTICHOKE methods believed the memories implanted in their minds were real to the extent that they could even pass lie-detector tests regarding them. (pp. 38-42)
As Alfred McCoy has stated in A Question of Torture, these CIA methods have "metastasized" to other segments of our government, for instance the military which runs Guantánamo. Given this fact, and the similarity of the treatment meted out to suspects in the "War on Terror" to those subjected to CIA experiments, it is easy to see why the Guantánamo Six are to be tried by military commissions which ignore all established rules of due process. If they were to be tried by a normal civilian court, their testimony would have to be dismissed as unreliable, not simply because they have been tortured, but because they have been subjected to what the CIA calls PSYWAR. Whereas traditional methods of interrogation, whether they employ torture or not, aim at the discovery of truth, PSYWAR aims at the creation of falsehood-- false confessions, false identities, false attribution of violent crimes (such as 9/11). To the inhumanity of torture it adds the supreme indignity of robbing an individual of his or her own free will. Men like Al Qahtani are victims of trauma beyond what most of us can imagine and completely unfit to stand trial before any court. If they were guilty, they could have been tried years ago and, even if they had been roughed up a bit, convicted to the applause of nearly everyone. As it is they have been psychologically maimed to the point that we will never know the truth. And these six have undoubtedly been chosen because they are the ones with whom PSYWAR has been the most successful-- what indescribable horrors are being inflicted upon those who are still holding out against it?
The trial of the Guantánamo Six is a travesty of justice, not simply because the military commissions violate constitutional safeguards of due process, but because the minds of the accused have been tampered with. Certainly they have been victims of torture, and one can see in the types of tortures to which they have been subjected all the earmarks of PSYWAR. Given the widespread involvement of politicians, military men, intelligence specialists, medical personnel and pharmacists enjoying the utmost power and prestige in this outrage, one can only conclude that the real agent of terrorism in this world lies not in the Muslim world-- even that of Muslim extremists-- but in our own society.
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